Repo (The Henchmen MC Book 4) (12 page)

It wasn't long before the shit hit the fan with his men. Everyone was vying for his position, trying to lead the others, trying to control the trade.

But, fuck them, that was my fucking legacy.

"You really slithered into his role," Wayne, my Uncle's second, said, nodding his head at me. Wayne was Seth's oldest friend and, in a way, became another uncle to me over the years. He taught me to play pool and tie a tie as my uncle was a staunch advocate for never wearing anything other than jeans and tees. He was big and reasonably fit with a taste for bourbon and dime store cigars, black hair, and eyes to match. I nodded at his comment, shrugging away what I thought was a compliment. "Like a snake," he added, drawing my attention from the pills I was sorting.

"A snake?"

"Yeah. And you know what they say about snakes and snitches," he went on and I felt myself stiffen as the unmistakable click of a pocket knife filled the quiet room. I knew. Oh, I knew. It was his fucking favorite phrase. I'd heard it hundreds of times over the years. "They get it where they slither."

"You mother
fucker,
" I shouted, pushing away from the table so hard that I pinned it, and therefore him, against the wall.

"Clueless little shit you always were. Never meant for fucking leadership. All loyalty, no fucking brains of your own," he seethed, pushing the table away and making his way toward me, knife still in his hand as his words landed hard, settling somewhere on my soul.

"Here's the thing about loyalty," I said, taking a step back, letting him think I was scared, like I was scarred from being worked over the night of my uncle's death.

"What's that, Rye?"

"It extends beyond the grave you fucking backstabber," I yelled, charging suddenly and sending us both flying to the ground. My hand grabbed his wrist, squeezing until I heard a crunching sound that was a sick sort of music to my ears. I grabbed the knife out of his useless hand as I straddled his center. "Is this the same knife?" I asked, knowing it was. The bastard was oddly attached to his pocket knife. His father had given it to him on his thirteenth birthday. "Say it!"

Wayne's face twisted. "Yeah, that's the knife I plunged into your uncle's heart when he told me that he was moving you into second when you turned eighteen. Same knife I carved into your face, boy. See, Seth was made for leadership. Until your ass showed up and softened him. Me and the men, we'd been seeing it for years. We'd been planning on pushing him out. We'd come over that night to talk to him about stepping down. But then he pulled that shit about forcing me down a peg and pushing you in my place. And, well, me and the boys, we had no patience for that shit."

All of them.

All of his men had turned their backs on him, had been plotting his demise.

Then all of them had taken a part in his murder.

And then my beating.

No fucking wonder I'd had so much damage.

I felt an odd calmness settling over me as I looked at the knife, twirling it in my hand, imagining my uncle's blood all over the blade, my own blood mingled with it.

"Give it up, Rye," Wayne said, rolling his eyes. "You ain't never spilled blood beyond a busted nose in your life. You aren't going to use that on me."

He was right about one thing and wrong about the other.

It was true I'd never stabbed or shot anyone before. I had never needed anything more than my fists.

But I'd also never needed to avenge the death of the only decent man I'd ever known.

So I was, abso-fucking-lutely going to use the son of a bitch's knife on him.

Then I did, pulling back and stabbing the blade into his heart like he had done to my uncle, then pulling it out and slicing it down his cheek like he had done to me. And then I sat there, watching as he choked on his own blood, watching his chest hitch in the same unnatural way my uncle's had for a long couple of minutes before he died.

Hell, his body was almost exactly in the same spot Seth's had been when he'd died.

I got up, washed my hands, tucked the pocketknife into a bag along with whatever shit I could, including a huge supply of cash Seth kept to pay his suppliers then stored it in my uncle's piece of shit, only half restored Chevy Chevelle.

But I didn't leave. Not yet. Oh, no.

Because Wayne wasn't the only man who needed to pay.

They all did.

That night, briefly, I stopped being me.

All the grief, the love, the betrayal, it swirled together until it became a bigger part of me than I was anymore.

That night I took off on foot and I exacted revenge.

For my uncle.

For myself.

For the dead sense of loyalty inside me.

The second man got the same treatment as Wayne. The third got stabbed ten times as the rage started to surface. The next was missing the things he had used to betray my uncle with when I was done with him: his tongue, his hands, his balls. He'd died before I even got to the part where I was removing his body parts like a medical school cadaver. By the last man, I was pretty sure all that was left was a bloody pile of meat, nothing recognizable as even human anymore.

Done, dripping blood and reeking of death and sweat, I climbed in my uncle's car and I got the fuck out of the town I knew would only let me be the monster I had become that night instead of the man I knew I was underneath it all.

I got out of Detroit with a scar on my face and some dark marks on my soul that wouldn't let me sleep at night, images of my uncle taking his last breaths as he tried to warn me of the snakes in our grass and images of my hand shoving a knife into the heart of a man who had been family to me and watching him choke on his own blood, eyes popping out of sockets, tongues slicing off, insides becoming outsides, and death becoming nothing but sport were memories always sticking to the inside of my eyelids when I tried to close them. But I figured that was a fair penance to pay.

The Chevelle died on me in some shitty part of town in Jersey.

I figured it was fate, got a crummy apartment over a liquor store with the money I had, and started working at an auto body shop. That was how I met Cash. We hit it off. He brought me around the club. Reign gave me a nod when I showed interest in being a prospect. From there, it was all history. I had a new family. I had men who were loyal to death and beyond.

The day I got patched-in was the day I went to the tattoo shop and got my back piece started- the snake and the obnoxious, ostentatious gilded pocketknife stabbed through his head. As soon as I could, I got the quote as well, forever marking myself, reminding myself that there was nothing in life more important than loyalty.

Snakes and snitches get it where they slither.

So when Reign gave me an assignment, I did what I was fucking told, no questions, no hesitations, no lip.

It wasn't an option to not do it.

There was no choice.

I didn't tell Maze that though.

"It's just how it is, honey," I said instead.

"I don't think I need to tell you how screwed up that is," she said, her voice still soft. "To not have a mind of your own. That's so messed up."

"Maze..." I said, my tone begging her to understand. "Look at me," I demanded when she just kept looking at her feet. She had too much pride to keep her eyes averted. She sucked in a slow breath and turned her head.

"What now?"

I watched as my hand rose and reached out to her, stroking down the slightly sun-burnt skin under her eyes. Her eyes closed for a second as her breath rushed out of her. I wasn't stupid. Maze wanted me. When I had fucked up and kissed her in the kitchen, she had been just as needy and lost in it as I had been. The only reason it stopped was because I stopped it and when I moved away from her, her legs weren't strong enough to hold her weight.

I exhaled, my gut twisting as I knew I was crossing a line, as one of my hands went to her hip to steady her and the other grabbed her under her knee so I could lift it and move it to the other side of the limb we were sitting on, so she was straddling it facing me. Her hazel eyes went to my face, her brows drawn together as my other hand went to her hip as well and I used them to pull her toward me. My fingers traced down her thighs to her knees again, lifting them enough to drape them over mine so I could pull her against me.

She didn't pull away. She didn't flinch.

"Now this," I said, my voice soft as my hands went to frame her face as I lowered my head toward hers.

"You're breaking the rules," she whispered, eyes still on mine.

"Fuck the rules."

Nine

Maze

The kiss in the kitchen had been rough, primal, demanding. But in the tree in the dark, our bodies illuminated only by the moon and stars and serenaded by crickets and the distant thrum of rock music from the party, his lips landed on mine soft, so soft that I felt my belly flutter hard for a moment at the contact. My eyes closed, my hands moved up and out and twisted into the material of his tee. My legs tensed over his, pulling me closer until my pelvis pressed against his. Finding him hard against me, a small moan escaped my lips.

His hands slipped from my face, sliding down my back until his palms landed high on my ass, using it to drag me upward onto his lap so his cock pressed against my sex. My legs tightened around his hips as I dragged myself against him, trying to ease the sudden and overpowering heaviness in my lower stomach. Repo grunted against my lips as I stroked him again before his teeth nipped into my lip hard and he pulled backward.

I made some sort of whiny noise in my throat that had him chuckling gently. "Honey, we'll fall out of this fucking tree if we keep it up," he murmured, brushing my hair behind my ear then trailing his nose up the column of my neck before planting a kiss just below my ear.

"Worth the risk," I said, turning my face down and into his neck to bite into the skin hard enough to smart.

"Be kinda hard to explain why we both broke our legs," he said, still sounding amused. I heard myself grumble again, sliding off his lap, so turned on it was practically painful.

"Fine," I said, ducking my head and moving away from him, trying like hell to ignore the insistent throbbing between my legs.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Repo's legs move out toward the front of the tree limb. A second later, he was swinging himself down to the ground, landing into a squat before turning back to face me, arms up in the air.

"What?" I asked, shaking my head at him.

"Come on. I got you."

At that, I felt a smile pull at my lips. "Um... no."

"I'll catch ya, Maze. I promise."

"Yeah... no."

He sighed but didn't drop his hands. "Come on honey, you got to learn to trust someone sometime."

"Yeah except I always end up trusting the wrong people," I admitted before I could think to censor myself.

His head tilted to the side. "So a couple jackasses fucked you over. You can't use that as an excuse to never trust someone again, Maze. Take a leap of faith. I'll catch you."

"And be in the perfect position to drop me on my ass," I said quietly to myself, knowing it was the truth. But I took a breath and pushed off the tree, enjoying the dropping sensation in my stomach as I free fell for a few seconds before Repo's arms closed around me, holding me up against his chest so his face was just barely above my breasts.

"Was that so hard?" he asked, smiling up at me and I had that feeling I felt a couple weeks ago: he was trouble. He was so, so much trouble.

"So what now? Are we just gonna stand here all night?"

"Now we get to remember what it's like to be teenagers," he said, his hands suddenly releasing me, making me automatically slam my hands down on his shoulders to keep from crashing down on unsteady legs. But his arms just went under my ass, forcing my legs around his hips. With that, he led us several yards back toward the party. My heart started pounding frantically in my chest the the idea of being seen. "Relax honey," he murmured and then I felt his hands squeeze my ass then drop it. I dropped my feet to the ground and turned.

"Seriously?" I asked, smiling at the car he had been working on for weeks.

"Hop in," he said, rocking back on his heels, hands tucked into his front pockets, looking very much like a teenager trying to talk a girl into his backseat.

"Oh, gee, I don't know. I have a curfew," I said, looking up at him from under my lashes. "And I don't know what you heard, but... I'm a good girl," I teased.

A wicked little smile toyed at his lips. "Come on, it'll just be our little secret," he grinned.

"Really, I'm..." I started, but before I could finish speaking, he came at me, pinning my back against the car with his chest as his hand moved between us, slipping between my thighs and pressing hard against my sex, dragging out an unexpected moan.

"What was that about a curfew?"

I pulled in a breath, my hand curling into his shirt near the waist of his jeans. "Really I..." his fingers curved in, hitting my clit with perfect pressure and making me face plant against his chest.